"Jordan's condition would be exposed and how poorly you've handled it."
"What? As soon as I found out--"
"You kept it secret. You were too embarrassed or whatever to take her immediately to the doctor. Never mind that you hid all this from me, another woman, you hid it from your own husband until she had an abnormal menstruation, and now you have her thirteen-year-old brother tutoring her about sex."
"Tutoring?"
"What did he give her for her birthday?"
The silence we heard thundered in both our hearts and minds. "Christopher told you about that?"
"Of course," Grandmother Emma said. "And also that you approved and even complimented him on the gift."
"He was just trying to be helpful, to be a big brother."
"A thirteen-year-old boy is now an expert on female matters? What other advice has he given her? Do you even know?"
I looked at Ian. His face was bright red.
"Did you say anything to Daddy or to her about my Sister Project?" he whispered. I shook my head quickly.
"Just imagine," Grandmother continued, "what it would be like to have such information, such embarrassing information, revealed in a public courtroom.
"The child will have to be brought in to testify as well" she added.
"You would do that?"
"Once it's in the hands of attorneys..."
"You're more of a monster than I imagined," Mama said.
"Don't be melodramatic. All I'm saying is we should avoid all that. I am prepared," she continued, "to give you a confident sense of independence. I will tomorrow go into my attorney's office and set up a very sizable trust fund for the children. I will deposit a quarter of a million dollars in an account solely in your name with no conditions whatsoever."
"What about Christopher?"
"Christopher will pledge to end his sexual travels," she said. We heard Mama laugh.
"Pledge? Promise? Even if he wrote it in his own blood, it would be no more valuable than the paper itself."
"I have already seen to it that the woman at the supermarket was fired. She is gone from the scene and will never return."
"You paid her off?"
"What I did is not of any importance. The dirty episode is over," Grandmother Emma said. "I am also taking a firmer control of Christopher's purse strings."
"He'll only resent me more," Mama said.
"Maybe. .maybe he'll finally grow up. In the meantime coexistence is the order of things. Countries that have adversarial positions to each other can do it, why can't a man and a woman?"
"I don't know," Mama said, but she sounded like she was softening.
"He's truly a little boy. He came running to me just the way he did when he broke something or got into trouble as a teenager. I was the one he came to when he was asked to leave his first college. Once, you saw something of value in him, some reason to tit your own destiny to his," Grandmother Emma reminded Mama. "Think about that."
"As you said. I closed my eyes to what I knew he was. I was too young and impressionable to see the truth back then."
"Well, now you do. I hope. He wants to come back to apologize to you. Listen to me, Caroline. You have problems with your children. You don't want to be out there alone. Jordan needs the best of
everything, medical, therapeutic, everything. She has new and heavy emotional issues. Why load on the horrors of a broken home, a mean divorce